Reality: A universe of information

WHATEVER kind of reality you think you’re living in, you’re probably wrong. The universe is a computer, and everything that goes on in it can be explained in terms of information processing.

The connection between reality and computing may not be immediately obvious, but strip away the layers and that is exactly what some researchers think we find. We think of the world as made up of particles held together by forces, for instance, but quantum theory tells us that these are just a mess of fields we can only properly describe by invoking the mathematics of quantum physics.

That’s where the computer comes in, at least if you think of it in conceptual terms as something that processes information rather than as a boxy machine on your desk. “Quantum physics is almost phrased in terms of information processing,” says Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford. “It’s suggestive that you will find information processing at the root of everything.”

Information certainly has a special place in quantum theory. The famous uncertainty principle – which states that you can’t simultaneously know the momentum and position of a particle – comes down to information. As does entanglement, where quantum objects share properties and exchange information irrespective of the physical distance between them.

In fact, every process in the universe can be reduced to interactions between particles that produce binary answers&colon; yes or no, here or there, up or down. That means nature, at its most fundamental level, is simply the flipping of binary digits or bits, just like a computer. The result of …

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